no more band-aids
I haven’t really played with a client app for posting to a blog in a few years. The web interface for WordPress is pretty darned good now. But MarsEdit 3 just came out, with rich text editing. That might be pretty cool… Does it handle media?
Looks like it might. And it integrates with my Flickr account, too.
Pretty slick. It handles media uploads, categories, tags, pages and posts. I just might have to pick up a license…
Sounds cool, but is the 90 second limit real?
Flickr’s official stance on the time limit is this:
Video on Flickr grew out of the idea of “long photos” and as such, we’ve implemented what might seem like an arbitrary limit of playing back the first 90 seconds of a video. 90 seconds?
We’re not trying to limit your artistic freedom, we’re trying something new. Everyone has endured that wedding video, where even the bride will fast-forward to the “good bit.” In fact, even Tara at FlickrHQ hasn’t made it past the first 90 seconds of her own wedding video.
Just try it! It’s fun once you get the hang of it.
If that’s the case, why not put some kind of filter on the size of photographs? The number of photos in a set? The number of photos uploaded by an individual? There are lots of people posting photos to Flickr that could easily fall into the same category of annoying and boring wedding videos. Why treat video differently?
Yup. Only plays the first 90 seconds of an 8:24 video. Stupid.
WordPress 2.5 went gold this morning, and I figured I’d go ahead and upgrade my blogs.
The very first thing I did was back. everything. up. Files, data, configuration. I used rsync to send everything to my desktop box on campus, where it will be further automatically backed up by Time Machine to an external drive. You can never have too many backups. Not that anything ever goes wrong…
Then, I upgraded the relatively simple mindfulseeing.com photoblog – no problems at all. WP 2.5 seemed happy on my server, and there weren’t any issues with the upgrade process. Now to try it on my main blog…
I made sure all plugins were up to date, then disabled every one of them. Upgraded WordPress and ran the database upgrade. Logged in again (it updates the password storage hash, so you get to login again to update that), and everything seemed good. Quickly poked around the shiny new admin interface, which is nice but will take some getting used to. Then, I headed over to the Plugins page to start enabling the constellation of stuff I use to make my blog do what I want. They all worked, with the exception of the Popularity Contest plugin. So I left that one disabled.
Interesting. The visual editor seems to be cranky. The ctrl-A shortcut to fire up the hyperlink doowackie doesn’t work, and when I hit the “link” icon in TinyMCE, I just get a blank popup. I’ll try nuking the TinyMCE plugin and reinstalling from the fresh WP 2.5 copy…
I do like the new Tag autocompletion. Kinda like what Drupal has had for what? 2 years now…
Anyhoo… If you can read this, it kinda sorta worked.
Seems to have worked, so far. The “Similar Posts” plugin borked, so I had to disable that. Everything else Just Seems To Work™.
So, what’s the difference between Categories and Tags now? I used to use Categories as tags. Are they both interfaces to the same table in the database? One way to find out…
Update: oh. they’re separate things. well, that’s silly. so, now all of my old /tag/tagname links that used to point to category pages now point to empty “tag” pages because none of my posts have actual tags. That’ll be fun to clean up…
Update 2: wasn’t so bad. just went into the permalink settings and had “tags” point to /tags and left my “categories” pointing at /tag. Not exactly what they had in mind, but whatever.